Parkland College synchronized their passwords with Password Station making it easier for their end users to access Office 365

Established in 1967, Parkland College is a two-year community college based out of Champaign, Illinois. Today, the college enrolls approximately 18,000 students annually and employs approximately 450 academic instructors and administrative support staff. Their digital growth has been accomplished by piecing together solutions as they have become necessary, which has resulted in multiple Active Directory environments, a Novell environment with GroupWise, and an implementation of Colleague by Ellucian all running simultaneously.

The Problem

When Amir Kassem, the Chief of Admission Officer, looked into adding an implementation of Office 365 in the summer of 2014, he knew that their current setup was unsustainable. In order to reduce the complexity of their many integrated environments and to simplify the number of user IDs and passwords that were currently necessary, Mr. Kassem determined that a third-party solution would be the most effective. He researched his options through InfoTech reports, and then decided on Avatier’s Password Station based on the cost-effective pricing structure and the product’s easy adaptability to the college’s needs. Thanks to Avatier’s excellent customer support and simple installation process, it took approximately two months to install and roll out Password Station.

After a brief spike in service desk requests because of the unfamiliar new system, Password Station soon began delivering the anticipated results. Service desk calls were reduced by 60% between December of 2015 and December of 2016, freeing up their employees to dedicate their attention to other aspects of their jobs. Furthermore, Password Station helped Mr. Kassem to simplify the school’s many environments by synchronizing login credentials.

The Solution

Two years after implementing Avatier’s Password Station to simplify their directory setup and eliminate the problem of multiple usernames and passwords, Mr. Kassem is pleased with the results. “When we started we had four Active Directories, and we needed a quick solution to allow us to synchronize a password among all of our Active Directories. Eventually we wanted to reduce our infrastructure to only two Active Directories,” he explains. “We purchased Avatier to solve the problem. Using Avatier, we were able to synchronize the passwords, which made it much easier for our end users to access Office 365.”

Furthermore, Mr. Kassem was impressed by the efficient, easy setup. “We needed a quick solution to help us with a critical transition to Office 365,” he points out. His research led him to Avatier, which has been just the solution that he needed. “UserIDs and password management were a big problem, and Avatier helped us fix those problems in a timely fashion,” he says.

Benefits

The primary benefit of Parkland College’s installation of Avatier’s Password Station has been the large drop in password reset requests to the school’s service desk. The simplification of the school’s user directories has been another notable upside. “We liked Avatier,” Mr. Kassem comments. “It seemed like the progression was pretty straightforward. We had to think about initial IDs and how to set initial passwords for users, but beyond that it was simple.”